It's time to tune up for today's audiences.

PEOPLE who love classical music are a gloomy bunch. Who knows why? It might be the high ticket prices we're forced to pay for recitals and concerts. Perhaps it's the sense of alienation we feel not knowing--or caring--who Kid Rock is. Maybe it comes from listening to all that Bartok.

Then again, maybe we're depressed because we should be. It's become conventional wisdom that classical music--one of the indisputable prizes of Western civilization--is doomed, kaput, booked, so to speak, with a first-class berth on the midnight train to slab city.

There's lots of evidence. Fewer than 20 commercial classical music stations remain in the U.S., according to the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio, and the vast majority of these specialize in "classic lite," playing and re-playing the same boneless snippets from the baroque and romantic repertoires.

Public radio stations--once the bulwark of classical programming in the U.S.--are giving themselves over increasingly to talk and news. (Just what the world needs: more talk.)

Meanwhile, symphony orchestras wobble toward bankruptcy, record labels drop their classical artists, schools shelve their music programs, and sales for classical compact discs stagnate or decline. Cue the dirge.

Lots of money

Not so fast, says Klaus Heymann: The received wisdom is wrong. And he is in a fine position to know. As founder and president of Naxos Records, Heymann, 67, is one music company executive who has managed to make money, and lots of it, even in an era when the appetite for serious music seems at an all-time low.

How has he done it? Robert Goldfarb, a California-based radio and music consultant, says Heymann's success is rooted in "two revolutionary insights."

First, says Goldfarb, Heymann recognized that most buyers of classical CDs were more interested in the music itself than the artist playing it. Second, Heymann saw that two thirds of the cost of a CD went to pay the artist's fees and promotion expenses.

Thus by commissioning new recordings of the standard repertoire by competent, if unknown and hence less expensive, artists, Naxos could sell CDs for a third of the price charged by most record companies.

Since its founding in 1987, Naxos has grown to become the biggest producer of classical music compact discs in the world. So when Heymann says the death of classical music is by no means inevitable, he's worth hearing.

"Classical music is alive," says Heymann. "It's classical music organizations that are ailing." And their demise is their own fault--the result of an almost willful refusal to cultivate new audiences. "Our music schools are full," he says. "Millions of children are taking piano or other music lessons. But this and other audiences have been ignored."

Parks, screens

He notes that orchestra concerts held in municipal parks routinely draw tens of thousands of listeners, while the same orchestra might have trouble filling a medium-sized concert hall.

"Turn performances into events," he says. Loosen the formality that smothers classical music. Conductors should learn to talk to their audiences, preparing them for the piece they're about to hear. Thanks to television, audiences now expect to see the faces and hands of musicians in close-up--a desire easily satisfied by installing large-screen televisions in the concert hall.

"Audiences instinctively want to applaud after each movement in a piece of music," he says. "Let them. And if they don't want to dress up? Fine."

Management needs to be leaner as well. "Look at the organizational chart of the average orchestra: Directors, assistant directors, creative directors, assistant creative directors, and on and on. It's hard to believe there's a shortage of money with such flabby management."

Part businessman and part missionary, Heymann bristles with ideas. Business schools should teach courses in arts administration. Radio stations could pave the way for new classical compositions by playing them and explaining them in cooperation with the local orchestra. Concert programs should be written in dramatic prose and printed in color--"with lots of pictures."

Music lovers might shrink from Heymann's ideas as yet another instance of dumbing down the arts. The formality surrounding classical music, after all, is merely a reflection of the reverence and awe that great human achievements deserve. And the world could use a little more reverence and awe.

Heymann shrugs off the criticism. As a businessman, he says, "I know there's an audience out there. There's a lot of money to be made if someone learns how to extract it."

But sooner or later Heymann the businessman gives way to Heymann the missionary. "Young people today don't even understand that our music is superior to what they're listening to. How are you going to teach them that? Because this is the important thing: the music must be saved."

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.